Freak

I've always been a bit of a perfectionist in many aspects of my life -- but particularly school. As soon as I was old enough to see a shrink (yes -- I also grew up in a McMansion -- sorry, peeps) I started to believe that my academic perfectionism was related to my upbringing, particularly my relationship with my father. My dad is a wonderful, brilliant man with an IQ of about 600 million. I may look exactly like him physically, but the IQ thing didn't really carry over. However, despite my lack of relative brilliance (he's a doctor, I'm a...marketing person?), the cliche of "You got a 98%? What did you get wrong?" was still my family's normal way of saying "good job."

All through high school and college, I got almost-straight As. I'm not denying that I'm smart, but I'm also a really hard worker and always felt like I was under pressure to be academically perfect. And I always assumed that my "beating myself up for a B+" attitude was because of the way I was raised and deep down I was meant to be a laid-back chick.

Well, guess what. My shrink gets an A for effort, but an F for figuring me out.

Now that I've gone back to school, I am not being pressured by anyone except myself! I'm paying for this degree with my own money, taking classes it on my own time, and I don't have to show my dad my report card. :P It's been years since I've made peace with my "issues" and my relationship with my dad is totally normal. But I am still a freaking perfectionist!

I'm working in a group for my final project (due Friday), and each person in our group is tasked with developing about 10 slides for our final presentation. I had planned to get started on mine last night until I saw that another group member had already uploaded his slides. I made the mistake of taking a look, and spent the next three and a half hours redoing his work (which was perfectly adequate in the first place). I never even got started on my own! So now I'm up at 5:30 a.m. trying to catch up.

Perfectionist? Control freak? Both? Help!